He's also confident that despite the damaging downtime Xbox Live went through last Christmas, the 19th November launch won't cripple the servers.

"I can tell you that when Robbie Bach is on the phone on Christmas Day calling people asking what the hell is going on, and that's coming down from Steve Ballmer... that's the kind of attention it got last holiday.

"Many things have changed since then, and we realised the kind of growth trajectory we were on and had to prepare for it," he said.

Elsewhere in the interview, we asked Johnson whether he knew of any changes to the Xbox 360 Arcade SKU, which goes for GBP 129.99 over here but only includes a 256MB memory unit. NXE would eat up half of that, leaving little room to manoeuvre.

"I think the clear message is that if you want to get on Live then you should go out and buy a hard drive to actually enjoy that entire experience," he said.